Taxi Driver
by fluggerbutter
Summary: "A young woman of undeterminable age stands at a gloomy dock staring out to sea. Her eyes seem to reflect a sadness only a person far beyond her years could have collected." Violet Baudelaire finds herself washed upon the shores of Briny Beach - the very place where her misfortune started. Her ship has crashed. Her family is nowhere in sight. And then comes the taxi driver.
1. Briny Beach

A young woman of undeterminable age—she could be sixteen or twenty-four; either way she is young and rather pretty, with eyes that seem to reflect a sadness that only a person far beyond her years could have collected—stands at a gloomy dock staring out at the sea. She is sopping wet, and drops of saltwater drip down from her dark hair onto the wood underneath her bare feet. It is cold, so cold, and in the midst of her tangled thoughts she wonders if it is, in fact, December.

Her lungs feel full and heavy; there is still water to be expelled from her system. She coughs, and it hurts her chest at first, but soon she can breathe again.

She is awfully cold.

A small town rests behind her, the town the dock belongs to, but it is dark and empty and not a single light flickers in the windows. She doubts that there is anyone living here anymore.

To either side of her is the seemingly endless beach, the coastline of which she finds terrifyingly familiar.

She closes her eyes and hugs herself tighter, not only for solace from the biting cold but also in an attempt to ease her mind as she tries to remember how she came to find herself suddenly deposited upon these abandoned shores.

Images, sounds, feelings—they flash through her head like distant memories; rocks of immense size looming right before her eyes, and then pain and screams and crashing waves, and three desperate faces calling her name. _Violet_. She remembers them and she remembers herself; she is alone and she should not be. Klaus, Sunny, Beatrice. Her eyes flutter open as she feels a sharp pain right where her heart beats, unsteadily, unsure.

_You were supposed to take care of them._

She feels numb, and it isn't just because of the weather.

Her heart skips another beat, and then two.

_How could you have let yourself drift away?_

She is still not entirely sure of what happened, but she knows that it is her fault, because it was her duty to protect her siblings and Kit's daughter, christened in honour of their very own late mother; it was her job, she had known that, and she had let them slip out of her grasp.

But she has survived. Maybe they will, too. She latches onto that one glimmer of hope, her one ray of sunshine in the infinite darkness. Perhaps the ocean tossed them to where they needed to be, like it did to her. She swallows her uncertainty and tells herself to believe it, for if it weren't at least a plausibility, then she would no longer have any reason to live.

So what to do now? Her only remaining family is lost out at sea, or on the shores of distant lands—maybe together, maybe separated, but whatever has happened they're all most likely be miles and miles away from where she now stands. The baby could be crying as the tide washes her into a merchant's boat in an Arabian port; Klaus and Sunny could still be in the middle of the ocean clinging for their lives onto pieces of their broken ship.

After several moments of contemplating this, she takes a deep breath and begins to tug her dirty worn ribbon off her wrist—still with her after years of wear and tear—ready to tie her hair up and go through the age-old routine. She needs to think.

Halfway through the motions she hears the soft thrum of a car engine as a taxi pulls up beside her.

Violet jerks, spinning around as the vehicle's front bumper nudges her gently and then stops. Her eyes are wide and she has a feeling that she would look rather like a deer in the headlights, had the taxi's headlights even been on.

Why _aren't _they on?

The question can wait. For now there are many more important inquires running through her mind, such as, what is a taxicab doing in a deserted town in the middle of the night? Who is driving? And what do they want? The situation isn't pointing much in her favour at the moment—strangers at nighttime are dangerous, and are made all the more dangerous by cabs.

No one exits or enters the car, but she hears the engine shut off. Whoever is inside is prepared to wait. Wait for what? For _her_? No one could have possibly known she was going to be here—not even she could have foreseen their boat crashing; her landing upon the beach where she heard the news of her parents' death was mere coincidence.

Or was it?

Scrambled thoughts run through her brain in a frenzy, tumbling over each other and giving her the most conflicted of emotions. Hope, confusion, bewilderment—and the most prominent is terror, and it is blinding.

Yet there is nothing she can do but hunt down her fear and twist its neck, and throw it away to chase after her later like it's done for what now seems like most of her life. She pulls herself together with the words of her late mother—_if every decision you can make is a bad one then you may as well go through with them anyway—_and finishes undoing the knot on her ribbon, which has been dangling from her wrist since the taxi arrived. As calmly as she is able—her hands are shaking—she pulls her soaking wet hair back and in a single movement that can only be achieved by years of practice, ties it up.

The man in the taxi sees her do this in the darkness and he closes his eyes and leans back against the seat and remembers the words of his late lover. _If every decision you can make is a bad one then you may as well go through with them anyway. _His fist tightens around the envelope he has been clutching.

Most would deem it impossible for him to know that Violet Baudelaire was going to end up at Briny Beach this very evening—but the phenomenon is not entirely inexplicable. Oftentimes, one will have what most people call a gut feeling, and while nine out of ten it is simply an unexpected bout of common sense, the particular gut feeling that this man had that afternoon came from the connection he had long shared with the girl's deceased mother. When she died in that fire, he had felt it, and he remembers sitting there riddled with pain and regret and he had no idea why until he received a phone call from an old friend with a terrible cough.

And when the sixteen-year-old inventor was tossed through a storm clinging to the remnants of an old, old ship heading straight for place where everything changed, he felt that too.

Violet, still dripping, and still trying to summon up every bit of courage that she lost when she found herself on the beach without the three sole remaining members of her family, walks as fast as she can towards the car, and she pulls open the passenger door and sits herself inside and slams it shut with the force of someone who has just realised that they are very, very angry.

If this cab wasn't meant for her, then it sure as hell is about to be.


	2. The Letter

The man in the taxicab winces as the door is shut with a bang.

"You know," he says, the words tumbling from his mouth before he can have a chance to catch them, "All it needs is a firm push."

There is no reply, but he does not turn his head towards the girl to see her expression.

Violet Baudelaire.

He's seen her once or twice, but she was just a little girl back then, darting around the grownup's ankles during dinner parties, carrying heaps of junk to and from the kitchen for various inventions while baby Klaus sat in the corner watching her intently. They had been mere children, with no idea of the misfortune to come; no clue that their parents would be dead in less than a decade.

It breaks his heart, remembering, the smiles and shrieks of delight that used to come from the Baudelaire children. He had never liked the fact that they were Bertrand's, of course, but they were _hers _as well, and because of that he could never hate them.

Not for an instant.

Not even when he took a train down to the Village of Fowl Devotees and found out that it was there that Jacques had died, died because of them.

Not even when he sat upon that costal shelf tapping furiously at the keys of a typewriter, watching as tears for his sister fell upon the words and smeared the ink.

Violet Baudelaire.

It's unbelievable. Years upon years he's spent documenting her life and the life of her siblings, and still they remain a shadowy enigma in his life like everything else that the V.F.D. seems to touch, and despite his research they always seem to lie somewhere out of reality. Ghosts of something he never wanted to be a part of but was and always had been.

And here she is, she's real, he could reach out his hand and touch her ribbon and she wouldn't disappear and turn out to be a dream.

He can't believe it, not really, and he won't until he turns and sees her face, so impeccably like her mother's. And still he is unable to.

"Well?" she says, and her voice is hoarse from screams and the brine from the water still lapping at the shore beside them, and in spite of this the sudden urge to weep is overwhelming. That voice. He's typed her words in quotation marks so many times; he's written her sad and happy and angry and scared and he knows that if he ever writes up this meeting he will put her down as rough and exasperated.

Swallowing his tears he looks to his left with a weak smile.

Her hair is dripping wet and only now he notices it smells of the ocean. She's looking at him with a gaze of fierce defiance, one very uncommon for her according to what he's so far documented. Something must have snapped while she was standing on that dock—her manners have dissolved, whatever shame she might have once had is nowhere to be seen. Violet looks like she could take on the world and fight back and he is painfully reminded of _her_. That one time. He remembers her reaction when she read that article, and when she found it had been fake the difference in personality had been astounding.

The tides turn quickly with the Baudelaire women.

She does not break their eye contact. She acts more like her father but has her mother's eyes, deep and dark and hiding far too many secrets. But he can see her gaze wavering just a bit, the only part of her that gives away her fear. She's searching his own eyes, searching him, reaching out for comfort, reassurance, _anything_—and he knows what it feels like, that desperation.

"Violet," he says at last, and he can hear his voice break on the last syllable. He's uttered her name a thousand times, to librarians and annoying waiters and to stagehands and janitors and even, once, to a snake—and on paper the letters that make up her name have been written and typed and scribbled and jotted more times than he can count. But this is different. This is her name, said to her, and all of a sudden she is terribly real and he feels like a child whose fairy tale character has just come to life. And he realizes then that the documentation of a person does not make them seem any more real—it makes them more of a fiction, a fragment, a story.

Violet opens her mouth to say something but suddenly finds it impossible to utter a thing, and in that instant she wishes dearly for Klaus. He was always far better with words than she.

Eventually something has to be said.

"Who are you?"

Her voice is soft now, calmer, as if she's come to terms with her situation. It must be mentioned, though, that she hasn't. By the tone of the question he can tell that she really does not know who he is—but that is something to be expected. He has been avoiding her all his life, just like he's been avoiding the others. He just cannot face the truth anymore. Why do you think he's requested for his manager to keep his works listed as mere stories despite the words inside telling otherwise? It must be so easy for his readers, to get caught up in the whirlwind of mysteries and unsolved puzzles, of death and of tears and of arson, and then to flip back to the beginning and read '_This book is a work of fiction.' _Then they'd just go "oh" and laugh it off. What a wonderful way to live, he thinks. Just sublime.

"My name," he says, and thinks this is a perfect time to start the car, "is Lemony."

The name sounds so terribly familiar.

After a moment it clicks.

"My mother," she says, as he puts his hands to the wheel and his foot to the pedal and begins to back out of the dock and onto the street behind them, "This book, on the island I came from—your name was in it."

The car comes to a sudden halt, and Violet is jerked forward. She quickly reaches back for her seatbelt only to find that there is none. It's been torn off.

"Was it?" Lemony says softly. His fingers grip tighter on the steering wheel.

"Yes, but she can't possibly have been talking about you. She was going to name _me _that, if I turned out to be a boy, after someonewho had… died. So you must be named after him."

When he finds his voice it is quivering.

"No, that was… that was me. She was talking about me, yes." He pushes on the gas pedal again, with less force this time, and makes a slow U-turn so that now they're opposite the sea, and starts driving. They're on an open stretch of road than runs right through the middle of town, going on farther than the eye can see—it is terribly dark and the headlights are still not on. "I was… long story, I was supposed dead for a… rather long while, I'm afraid."

The familiarity of his speech patterns and movements and even his profile, from what she can see of it in the shadows, is beginning to nag at her.

"Have we met before?" she asks, though she thinks it unlikely. Perhaps they had come across each other once or twice during that one terrible year. But met proper—no, they couldn't have.

Jacques, he thinks, when he hears the question. Kit. They had always been easy to associate with each other. Close siblings were common among the V.F.D., after all—in times of despair sometimes immediate family was among the only groups one could trust. But even that faith had faded away as years went by. Relatives could no longer be counted on, not in situations like these.

"I believe," he says, stricken with pain though he tries not to show it, "You have met my brother. And… and my sister, as well. Late. Both of them."

Realisation dawns upon her quicker than he'd anticipated. "You're the third Snicket sibling."

"And the last."

The words are cold, and Violet realises he sounds judgmental behind the hurt. And one can hardly blame him. At that moment she feels as if the word _sorry _written a thousand times on the wall of a cave with her fingernails could hardly suffice for what she's caused his family.

And it _is _because of her, she realises. Jacques's execution. Kit's death on that beach after childbirth. All the fault of her and her siblings.

She's been the reason for so many unwarranted deaths.

Murders. Burnings. Accidents too.

The "I'm sorry" escapes her anyway, and in that instant he knows he forgives her in spite of it all.

"There will always be death, no matter where you go," he says, swerving left onto a fork in the road that Violet hadn't known was even there. "You of all people know that, Miss Baudelaire. They would have fallen eventually."

That is his forgiveness, and it is enough.

"In my lap," he continues, "There is an envelope. In the envelope is a letter, and written on the letter in invisible ink is a secret. But before the secret comes a message typed in the India ink that your mother bought for me on my eighteenth birthday, the same ink that was used to stain Ike Anwhistle's fingernails blue so that he could enter a garage in Yokohama meant for bikers from Switzerland. That, however, is irrelevant to the message itself, which I believe, dear Violet, you should have the honour of reading."

She blinks once, trying to make sense of what has just been said. Once she's sorted it out in her head she realises that all she has to do is open that envelope and read what's written.

With a shaky hand she reaches and takes the envelope from Lemony's lap.

She holds it delicately, as if it would break if she dropped it. And it just might. The corners are ragged and yellow and she knows that it's likely older than her. The words—it looks like a name, and something is scrawled in smaller font underneath it—written on it in fading ink are difficult to make out in the darkness.

Violet squints and thinks she can make it out.

_To Lemony. I'm sorry I had to go._

"But this says it's for you."

"Just read it," he replies, softly.

She says nothing more but flips the envelope over. The seal has already been broken. The V.F.D. symbol. The eye. She recognises it even without the advantage of light—even now she is being watched.

She takes a deep breath that rivals the one she took at the dock to calm her nerves and opens the envelope, pulling out the folded sheet of paper inside. The letter is even worse off than what it's been sitting inside for the past age.

That's her mother's handwriting, she sees now. She could never forget that curling script. When she was younger she'd always hoped she'd be able to print like her mother. Somehow it's instead stayed messy and out of control like her father's.

Her eyes scan over the letter. It's long, and though one corner seems to have been… burnt, it's still legible—or would be, if there were reading light available.

As if he had heard her, Lemony turns on the headlights, and it reflects into the car, making the words easy to see.

There's more on the other side, she notices.

"Should I read it out loud?" she says. There's no reply. It might be a yes, it might be a no—she decides to assume the latter. Being left alone with thoughts while reading a letter from her dead mother is not something she especially wants to do. Perhaps the sound of her own voice will make it easier.

"_Dearest Lemony,_

_If you're reading this, it means I've died before you. It seems rather morbid for me to be writing this letter so early in our relationship, but with the schism and the fires I feel that it is necessary. I've no idea what might happen. I could be stabbed in the back while writing this letter, even if it is by candlelight in this old abandoned warehouse._

_I don't know about your current situation. Perhaps you are old and have just attended my funeral, where there was a speech about what a long, happy life I lived. Perhaps, then, you are now a widower._

_That is unlikely."_

Violet has to pause here. That means the man she is sitting beside once held the love of her mother. It's a strange thought, but she understands, and it makes sense, even though the child in her is yelling that she couldn't have ever loved anyone else but her father.

"_A more probable scenario right now would be that I have just died a rather unfortunate and unprecedented death that came about due to some sinister events at a party. Or maybe it was _her_. Maybe she's finally decided to get her revenge. But if so, you're probably dead as well, and in that case this letter is of no use._

_Whatever might be happening in your life right now, Lemony, I just want you to know that if I were alive I'd be by your side. I hope you know that. It might be more comforting for me to say that I would have abandoned you long ago and gone sailing off with… I don't know, for all intents and purposes I could have gone running off with Bertrand! Imagine how ridiculous that would be."_

A bitter laugh escapes Lemony, and Violet wonders if he still loves her.

"_Anyway, the reason I'm writing this is because if I am, in fact, dead, I would like you to do several things for me._

_My first task is to please send the enclosed check to that ice cream shop on the corner of Gardenia Road and Red Herring Street. The one we always went out for root beers at before that waiter started dropping tacks in our drinks. I don't want them to go out of business, ever, and if you stop going I know they will. So just give it. _

_My second is to ship Ink to some remote jungle and give Monty a map to the spot so complicated that he only finds him in eighteen years exactly. This is important. _

_My third wish is for you to check up on Josephine ever few years, or send someone if you can't make it. She hasn't been the same since Ike's death and she needs someone to keep her steady._

_And my final request, love, is that you watch over my children should I have the fortune to have any."_

That is the end of the page. Violet has been trying to keep in her tears for a while now, and it is at this line that they finally spill. She wipes the first of them away before they can ruin the paper, but there are only more to follow.

When she flips the paper over and starts up again her voice is trembling.

"_They're probably your children too, so it may not be too difficult. But if they aren't—even if you do it from afar, just take care of them. Make sure they do not come in harm's way. And don't you ever involve them with the V.F.D. Do you understand me? Don't let them near this organisation, I want you right now to swear on your life that you will keep them away from our secrets. I do not want them to suffer as we did, as we are _doing_. And if they do somehow manage to entangle themselves in this complicated game of lies and fires, as I realise now it seems inevitable, I want you to guide them. Please."_

She chokes up on the last word. Her mother's pleading seems desperate, and she wonders just what she was doing hiding in that warehouse. Even Lemony is having difficulty concealing his desire to just break down and weep, and he's read through this letter a thousand times. Not once did he think he would be having the words read by one of the children that the love his life had requested he take care of. A child he'd failed. A child who had grown up far too fast.

"_There are simpler things required for them. Don't let them touch peppermints; they've more than likely inherited my allergies." _

A sad smile graces Violet's features.

"_Make sure they use coasters and always bring a book with them, and that they know the importance of being proud of themselves—this is also for you, Lemony. Never have I met another man with so much hatred for his own self. I love you. Why can't you, too? But don't let them become arrogant; they cannot be the next Olaf or Esmé._

"_Please. Please. Please. Please." _

The words come from Violet as much as they do from her mother. She wishes Lemony had come through with that request. She can, on some level, understand why he didn't, but… that fourteen-year-old Violet, two years ago; she wishes more than anything that someone had been there to keep them safe. And she is still a part of the sixteen-year-old Violet, the one reading this letter, the one still angry at herself for losing the only three people she really wants to care for.

"_Please._

"_Watch them. I may just be getting ahead of myself. I don't even know if I do have a single child, let alone more. But… this is important. One factor of all of our lives was that we never had a proper parenthood, and that may be just what has destroyed us. We never knew the love and care of a family. And document their lives, will you, Lemony? Keep separate commonplace notebooks for them. When my son reads his first words I would like to know, someday. Or maybe other people could. Start a book series, for all I care! Just keep up with them. You're the finest writer I know. Don't let that part of you slip away, for it's the only thing keeping you grounded. _

_This is, I now suppose, something like my last will and testament, written not so much earlier than I'd anticipated writing it. And if it is a will, then I leave you with the care and responsibility of my offspring, should they be orphaned or they be yours. I also give to you the possession of my car, Dad's typewriter, the packet of straws we used to use for root beer, the series of couplet books you love (yes, I own them—sorry for not telling you, I was afraid you'd steal them), and my brother's taxi._

_I also leave to you the sugar bowl. If I am gone then it is yours now. _

_(These would not sound important to anyone normal, but then again you never were. Make good use of them. _

_Promise?)_

_I had one last thing I wanted to tell you but there is no time; it would take too long and by then I really would be dead. I must leave. Just—remember to remember me once in a while when I'm gone, if you could: though, if you have no desire to I give you full permission to forget._

_As if you ever needed permission, Lemony Snicket. _

_With all my love—"_

"Beatrice," Lemony finishes, even before she begins to choke up on that last, simple solitary word. The sheer number of emotions stirred into that one word are so plentiful that she can almost feel them herself. They are deep and pain-ridden, as if all this man has ever known is grief. She can hear sorrow and despair and she thinks that if tears could be heard that's what they would sound like.

And above all else there is that overwhelming sense of _love_, and despite the doubts the eldest Baudelaire child still has about the mysterious Lemony Snicket she knows that anyone who cares for her mother as much as he still does could not ever be entirely untrustworthy.

She folds up the letter and tucks it back into the envelope, and without a word she leans over and gives Lemony a quick peck on the cheek—a phrase which here means the most meaningful gesture she might ever have the chance of giving, and the last remnants of the lost love of Beatrice Baudelaire that he will ever have.


	3. The Books

Violet leaves the letter on the dashboard and faces the window to wipe off her tears with the back of her hand, and for three quarters of an hour she remains so silent that Lemony assumes she has fallen asleep. Indeed, she must be exhausted. She certainly hadn't been in good shape when she entered the car—a crash of that magnitude and it seems impossible that she even made it out of the ocean alive and unscathed.

Her hair is beginning to dry out but the heater in this car hasn't worked for years and she's probably freezing—he's thinking about pulling over and giving her his coat for a bit when at last she looks back at him and says, "Why did you give me that letter?"

For a moment, he says nothing, and then—

"The words of a parent, a loved one… they will always mean far more than the utterances of any stranger. You know now, why I have returned for you, and I truly am sorry I have not done so sooner. You know I can be trusted, because no matter what you yourself think of me, your mother did and so shall you. Of course I hope you will eventually be able to believe me of your own choosing, but until then you are bound by your mother's love and my ability to give you what you cannot gain yourself."

She leans back on her chair, turns her head and raises it to the ceiling and sighs, closes her eyes again. The weariness in her expression is soft but clearly visible, and she looks so much older than sixteen. "I understand."

"I know you do," he says, for so many years of documenting her life and he has all but memorized her brain patterns. He turns one last corner—right, this time—and says, "We're almost there."

"Almost _where_?" she murmurs, though she does not expect an answer. And as anticipated, she does not receive one.

Lemony does, though, add, "Another reason I wanted you to read it was so that you would comprehend the reasons and circumstances that led me to write the books."

She opens her eyes, now, sits up straighter. "What books?"

He does not say anything more, simply nods towards the backseat, and Violet cranes her neck to see what he's referring to. The rays of an early sunrise have already begun streaming through the window, and the light touches upon a pile of novels buckled up in the middle of the seat. She counts twelve in all: they vary in size but most are fairly smallish. From the layout of the books and her position, she can read only three titles: _The Wide Window, The Ersatz Elevator, The Penultimate Peril—_

Each name brings back a flash of memories so heavy and painful that she gasps and spins her head to face the front, a shiver running down her entire length, because she has no doubt what the contents of those two books are and having experienced the events herself, her distress is understandable. The terror in her hasty breaths makes Lemony swerve and for a moment all is chaos and panic and the fear they have both learned to ignore so well is overpowering.

Then the taxi is on the road again and Violet has her head in her hands.

He expects her to stay silent until she calms down—that is the sort of thing Violet would do—but to his surprise she says through shaky, panicked sobs, "Why would you _do _that? Oh, for the love of what little is good and noble in this world I cannot fathom why you would under any circumstances want to return me back to—to _that… _why would you write anything so horrible, ever… you're _publishing _these?"

She turns her head up to the roof of the car once more and he sees that she can hardly contain her tears. "Why would you do that, Mr. Snicket?"

This is the part Lemony had been dreading, and apparently rightfully so. Reaction to something that brings back such undesired memories cannot really be predicted beforehand: this particular response is not completely unexpected, but it is certainly very out of character, and he is somewhat at a loss as to what to do.

"I did it for her," he finally musters, because it is all he can think of to say. And it is the truth. "I did everything from standing at the shores of Briny Beach with a soggy notebook in my pocket to driving up in her brother's taxi to the flaming Hotel Denouement, to pick up a sugar bowl that caused her death and the end of my world, for her. I traversed from the Village of Fowl Devotees to Heimlich Hospital on foot, for her. I sat in the middle of a burnt-down carnival and wept, for her, and for you, and for the winter-cold summers that I fight through without her and the winters that are even colder. I did it all for her."

Violet looks to him with well-founded desperation. Her tears do not mask the anguish in her deep brown eyes. "But you didn't save us," she says, and her voice cracks. "You followed my siblings and I to the island and back and never saved us. She told you to take _care _of us, watch over us and you just…"

She is unable to bring herself to finish.

Lemony stops the car, turns off the engine, removes the key. His head is hung, the brim of his hat hiding his expression.

"I know," he says, weakly. "I know. I know that indirectly I am just another fault in your lives, another useless adult within a sea of incompetence. I know… that you have a thousand reasons to hate me, as you well should. And I could make excuses but they would be lies, even if it is true that I was always two steps behind you and could never seem to catch up, and that if I'd found you it's unlikely that you would have been in any less danger than you already were. I know that I could have—as you like to put it—saved you, in some way, if I'd wanted to. But I didn't want to."

And here he turns to the window, as if she could not already hear the tears in his voice. The sunlight streaming in is frustratingly cheerful. "And do you know why, my dear, dear Violet?"

She says nothing, not because she does not know the answer but because she does not want to give him the benefit of one.

"Because I am a selfish man," he says softly, "and always have been. No matter how much I try to deny myself the truth, and no matter how many apparently selfless deeds I do for the Volunteers—no matter how much I loved your mother, I am, at heart, just as selfish as the fire-starters who left us far before the schism began. My sister… now there was a good woman. My brother. Your parents. All of them and many more, they were noble. I am not."

Violet's tears do not cease when he lists off these people. Because besides their unusual talent of being something most humans are not, they all have one thing in common—they are dead.

He voices her thoughts and her emotions through the held back sobs of a man who has given up on life, and the world, and almost everything save the people closest to his heart. "And yet here I am, alive and well, at least in the physical sense; they are ash and unmarked graves and the long-gone parents of orphans who are now struggling to survive themselves. I do not deserve to be alive and I am too selfish to die—there is a heavy contradiction there, Violet, and one I have never been able to face."

"You could change," she whispers. There is conviction in her voice that harmonizes with her sorrow. "If you just tried."

Then there is a silence, one so long and wrought with tension that it is tangible—he can taste the tears in the air and it feels like someone out in the universe is scorning them, so much does it feel like an ocean breeze tainted with grief.

And the silence, like many things in the last Snicket sibling's life, and like many things in Violet's, seems as if it will last forever—until it is over.

"The world," Lemony says as he opens the door and steps out of the taxi, "does not fit the picture in my head."

He leans back into the car and looks at her straight in the eye for the first time, with a thousand heartaches—a thousand regrets, a thousand missed chances to ask the right question, a thousand fires he could have stopped—visible in his gaze. "And it has not for a very, very long time."


	4. The Library

For two minutes, Violet does not get out of the car—instead she wipes the tears from her eyes with a torn sleeve and waits for her own sobs to subside, not willing to use the handkerchief in the glove compartment because it is not hers and because she does not know where it has been. She has not cried for herself or even for her siblings in a very long time, and had she thought herself at all justified in her tears she would have already left the taxi and followed Lemony Snicket with wet eyes to whatever dangers awaited her in the real world.

But there is no reason to weep for things that cannot be changed—though some may disagree with such a statement—and she is ashamed to be doing so, especially since her regret was directed at someone in particular. She should be glad that she has found a man she can at least somewhat trust: the Snicket siblings have not failed her before. She has merely failed them.

After a while she has swallowed her pain and feels like her face may not be quite as red as it must have been when she was crying, and she pushes the cab door open and steps outside.

The wind hits her so ferociously she feels as if she could not be any colder if she happened to slam into a wall of ice (an unlikely situation but still possible), and for a second she can hardly breathe, let alone think. The heater in the taxi had not been working but apparently the vehicle itself was enough to keep this ridiculous weather at bay, because she cannot remember feeling this cold since the Mortaim Mountains. Her fingers curl and she watches her breath fall from her open mouth and fade into the air as her previous gasp turns into a sigh. She thinks she can see the tips of her hair begin to freeze.

Wrapping her arms around herself, an action which does not help improve her warmth in the slightest, Violet takes in her surroundings, not really because she wants to have full bearings in the case of an emergency but because she wants to find Lemony and subsequently a possible fireplace—or possibly some other form of heat; fire is not something she wants to deal with terribly at the moment.

The taxi is parked on the side of a very wide, bare road, one that reminds her somewhat of Lousy Lane though the scent of horseradish is significantly absent and there is no sign of the scraggly apple trees that had once greeted the three Baudelaire orphans on their way to the house of Dr. Montgomery Montgomery. There is no sign of any sort of tree, actually—the whole area is completely bare of greenery. To her immediate right is a sidewalk and then a shabby old building with a sagging roof that looks like it could have been an inn at some point in its now miserable existence. It is probably where Lemony has gone. To her left, all the way on the other side of the road, there are piles of wood that might have, in days gone by, been houses or shops but are now falling apart and creeping with vines. Down the street she can see nothing but more of these piles of wood until it turns a corner, though she suspects that if she takes a peek there will be nothing on the next street either.

She turns around and is surprised to see that at the end of the road there is a building. It is tall and has crumbling pillars by the sides of the door, which is open. In fact, she is not so much surprised at the fact that there _is _a building there—it is a nice place to put a building, especially one so tall, as it blocks the dreary view of the rest of the surrounding landscape—but at the fact that it is a dead end. She is absolutely sure that they had driven into the town from this direction, no matter how much her tears may have been blurring her vision; even if she had not paid attention to the appearance of her environment, her sense of direction is still sharp. And right now that sense is telling her that this is the way she had come.

The back of her mind files a bit of information that at the moment her consciousness does not pay any heed to: there is a crackling noise coming from that direction.

In spite of the cold and the recently inflicted misery from the incident with the books, Violet furrows her brow and takes a step towards the building. She is curious. And usually curiosity leads to events alarmingly near to the end of the danger spectrum, such as the killing of cats or the kidnapping of orphans with fortunes to be inherited, but she does not believe this place to have been populated in quite some time. She has a feeling that Lemony would not be staying anywhere near people, anyway—he seems like the type to be in constant solitary confinement. Whether this is of his own choosing or because he has found rejection in his friends and his family and even his distant associates, she cannot guess. Perhaps it is a bit of both.

The wind is behind her now and she is a little less cold than she was before.

She walks.

The steps of the building are closer than they had appeared to be and before long she is standing at the top of the staircase with her head half inside the room, the frigid breeze still at her back as if waiting patiently for her to turn around and return to the winter. It whips at her hair and her dress and her ribbon, which only now she realises she has not taken off.

It is a library. There are no books, and there have not been any for a long time, but she can tell the second her eyes take in the room. Some shelves have been knocked over and are gathering dust but there are the carpet marks of heavy items that have long since been removed—couches and armchairs and other comfortable pieces of furniture suitable for reading a good novel—and the desk where a librarian must have once sat is still standing. Someone had tried to move it in the past; Violet can see from the floor that it is not in its exact original position. Its bulk must have been too heavy to lift. And for good reason: it looks like solid wood, more likely than not carved out of a single tree.

So there it sits, the librarian's desk without a librarian within the library without books. It makes her very sad, in a strange, nostalgic sort of way. She has not used this library before, and rightfully she should share no sentiment whatsoever for it—but like lying, and like dying, the sadness cannot be helped.

Someone used to spend hours in those chairs. Someone once hid a stolen item that wasn't really stolen behind a thick boring book on one of those shelves to keep a promise. Someone, once, fell in love with a girl here, and another in love with the world.

Someone, somewhere, alive or dead or otherwise, had once used this place as an escape. They had grabbed all the books they could hold off the shelves and hid themselves in a corner, traveling to the fantastic worlds of chocolate factories and midnight circuses, to jungles and oceans and universes outside universes that our minds cannot fully comprehend. They had loved this library the way her mother loved sundae shops with root beer floats and the way her father loved the theatre. And they had loved its books the way she does.

In Violet's eyes, empty libraries—along with arson, the deaths of all those close to you, and ignorant adults—are one of the few things that do warrant sorrow.

It is only then that she realises that furniture impressions are not the floor's only flaws. There are skid marks on the carpet, and they were made by no small vehicle. She looks back to make sure she's not being followed—who knows, with her luck?—and when she has confirmed that there's no one and nothing to be seen on the street save Lemony's taxi, she takes a step inside the library.

The crackling noise, it is louder. Again, her brain refuses to take in this fact directly.

She walks.

She avoids any detours around the fallen shelves, choosing instead to walk straight ahead—something has caught her attention. Though rightfully the cold should be growing less as she heads towards the back of the building, assuming there is a solid wall or a closed back door, she can feel cold wind blowing in from the direction she is heading.

So either the back door is not closed—

Violet takes a step around a tall shelf that is still standing, one that had been blocking her view.

—or there is a giant hole in the wall.

Violet stands straight and tall against the wind, expression unwavering even as the cold nips at her ankles and forearms and tips of her ears, even as the sight before her fills her with even more desolation than before.

Seaweed, she thinks, though some part of her mind insists that it cannot be. Seaweed, her mind says again, persistent. An entire forest of enormous, dead, dry seaweed on one side of a rough sandy road that looks like it was just a path of shells in its early days. Finally, she becomes fully aware of the crackling sound. It is the wind, rustling the lifeless yellowing leaves and making a din so loud it's a wonder she did not regard it earlier.

On the other side of the road, barrels, and hundreds of them. They must have held something important, once. She wonders if it was oil.

_Where am I? _She feels a now familiar sense of dread growing in the pit of her stomach. _I'm dreaming. I've fallen asleep on the boat, still heading for the mainland, with my siblings, with my daughter, and this is all a bad dream. That's all. _

But even her own inventive mind would not be able to come up with Snickets and seaweed and seashell roads, not all at once, not even in a dream.

Violet leans against one side of the hole in the crumbling plaster wall, a hole just big enough for an average taxi cab to drive through or perhaps a little bit bigger. She recalls now a moment that seems like decades away but in reality is only a couple of years behind her. The window in Aunt Josephine's house, the one in her library, overlooking the ocean. She remembers the shattered glass, remembers the note, remembers thinking that it was the end of her aunt and the end of her and her siblings: that Olaf would have custody of them once more. There were leech-infested waters ahead of them, and a fortune-hungry madman behind.

Sometimes she wishes that _had _been the end, that Olaf had taken their fortune and killed them off without a second though. But there had been hope, back then, and no matter how much she tries to dispel it there is still hope even now.

As she stares ahead she realizes that this place, too, inexplicably reminds her of the sea, though there appears to be no body of water for miles. Perhaps it is simply the forest—if one could call it that—of crackling kelp to her right, but she feels it is even more than that. Like this place _had _been the ocean, at some point.

Violet finally tears her eyes away from the scene before her. It is time to find out what is going on once and for all.

She turns around, clenches her fists, takes a deep breath.

And she walks.


End file.
